Launched in June 2013, Mosaic takes a lively, serious, and committed approach to Jewish issues and ideas.
The main feature in Mosaic is a full-length monthly essay on an issue or theme of pressing significance for Jews, Judaism, or the Jewish state. To enrich discussion of each essay, invited experts offer responses to the author’s contentions and conclusions, followed, at the end of the month, by the author’s reply.
In addition, Mosaic regularly carries a variety of briefer opinion pieces, thoughts on issues and events of the day, historical reflections, and the like. Finally, a permanent feature of the website is the daily “Editors’ Picks”: a handful of the day’s most urgent items, gathered from far-flung places around the web and introduced in short summaries of their specific substance and import.
In a daily e-mail to subscribers, and in regular updates on Facebook and Twitter, Mosaic’s editors engage in an ongoing conversation with our readers.
What brought Mosaic into being? Even where not facing threats to their physical existence, Jews today confront severe challenges to their identity, their staying power, their very reason for being. In addressing these challenges head-on, and in depth, Mosaic conceives itself as a place of analysis, judgment, and intellectual provocation. On issues of politics, society, culture, religion, and the arts, it offers criticism and argument, takes positions and defends them, and joins hands with all those everywhere intent on preserving the traditions and promoting the interests of the Jewish people.
Mosaic’s name, with its multiple associations, hints at the animating spirit behind these purposes. We express our trust in a permanent set of Jewish allegiances; in a model of heterogeneous elements coalescing into an ordered and integral whole; and in the mutually vitalizing interaction of the Jewish expressive genius with the highest achievements of other cultures and civilizations. In choosing the name Mosaic, we also wish to pay tribute to its use by other Jewish initiatives, among them a print journal of kindred purpose founded by students at Harvard College in the early 1960s and published at intervals ever since.